Rule 5 Pick Connor Thomas Could Be Brewers' Bryse Wilson Replacement

Days before shipping Devin Williams to the New York Yankees in what’s likely to be one of their most significant offseason transactions, the Brewers added a couple of left-handed pitchers to their 40-man roster during the winter meetings. One of them was Connor Thomas, whom Milwaukee plucked from the St. Louis Cardinals’ Triple-A affiliate during the big-league round of the Rule 5 draft.

Per the rules of the draft, Thomas must spend at least 90 days on his new team’s active roster in 2025 and cannot be sent to the minor leagues without passing through waivers and then being offered back to his original club. That inflexibility may seem suboptimal for the Brewers, but it should not be an issue if Thomas proves helpful in his projected role.

Taking a flier on a Rule 5 pitcher is nothing new for the Brewers, but this one differs from past selections. The club isn’t hiding a reliever in the bullpen as part of a long-term development project as it did with Wei-Chung Wang a decade ago. This is not a shot on an upside reliever like the Gus Varland selection. Instead, it’s a cost-effective means of filling an unglamorous but essential role within a successful run-prevention unit: versatile length.

Colin Rea and Bryse Wilson were useful in that capacity across the last two seasons, eating up 473 ⅔ innings with a competitive but unremarkable 95 ERA- (100 is average, lower is better). When other pitchers sustained injuries or battled inconsistency, Rea and Wilson kept the ship afloat with their steady availability.

Despite that production, the Brewers waived both at the onset of the offseason, evidently deducing from the growing red flags in their profiles that their most productive seasons were behind them. That presumably left finding the next Wilson or Rea – a durable and flexible innings-eater who keeps his team in the game in most of his appearances – as a key item on Matt Arnold’s winter checklist. Thomas profiles as that hopeful successor.

Unlike Rea and Wilson, who succeeded by inducing decently struck fly balls that a core of speedy outfielders could run down for outs, Thomas is a ground-ball specialist. Instead of a running two-seamer with limited depth, his primary fastball is a heavy sinker. Those differences aside, his other traits point to him filling a similar role.

In a broad sense, Rea and Wilson found success by tweaking the shapes of their unassuming pitches, learning the best ways to sequence them, and executing them well enough to induce the kind of contact the Brewers’ defense could convert into outs. Thomas, rated by FanGraphs as having 60-grade command of a five-pitch arsenal, is already on a similar trajectory.

The southpaw tightened up his cutter shape, shedding about an inch of induced vertical break on average and giving it more consistent cutting action (keeping the movement to the right of the vertical axis in the graphs below). After experimenting with a bigger slider during the final months of 2023, he morphed it into a sweeping breaking ball that averaged 12.6 inches of lateral movement. The cutter and slider now have cleaner and more consistent separation.

Struggles against right-handed batters plagued two disappointing seasons for Thomas in Triple-A, but their wOBA against him plummeted from .383 in 2023 to .281 in 2024. He accomplished that turnaround by attacking right-handers more diversely. He balanced his pitch usage against them, and instead of consistently pitching around the knees with his natural sink, he worked every quadrant within or near the strike zone.

Since adding the cutter late in 2022, Thomas has used it primarily up-and-in to righties. That location works with his low three-quarters release as a 5-foot-11 left-hander to create an uncomfortable angle for the hitter. The high cutter appears to bore in on them as Thomas slings it toward them. Jared Koenig and Robert Gasser are other low-slot lefties who weaponize their cutters similarly, and Wilson himself often pitched this way to left-handers.

The pitch was not effective for Thomas in 2023. In particular, righties ambushed the cutters he threw at the knees.

After those unproductive attempts at mixing in low cutters, Thomas kept them elevated to a greater extreme in 2024. He threw more cutters above the zone than in the lower third.

For those high cutters to be effective, at least one other pitch must work in conjunction with them. That seemingly led Thomas to a somewhat unorthodox strategy: throwing more sinkers right down the middle and in the upper third of the zone.

There’s a method to the madness. Throwing sinkers over the center of the plate instead of down and away created tighter tunneling with high cutters. The sinker also became the anchor off which the rest of Thomas’s arsenal plays. It forced hitters to start by looking down the middle, only for his other pitches to cut, sweep, ride, or dive in every other direction. They had more to cover, and locking in on a particular quadrant became more challenging.

The location graphics below (plotted by Thomas Nestico’s Pitching Summary web app) visualize this effect. Notice how Thomas’s sinker locations in 2024 overlapped more with each of his other pitches.

Improved pitch shapes, better tunneling, and two added ticks of fastball velocity enabled everything to fall into place in 2024. After consecutive seasons with an ERA north of 5.00 in Triple-A, Thomas posted a 2.89 ERA, 3.87 FIP, and 86 DRA-, all the best full-season marks of his professional career. The right-handed whiff rate against his cutter doubled, and their slugging percentages against every pitch in his arsenal dropped by over 100 points.

While Thomas worked almost exclusively in relief for the first time this past season, most of the drivers behind his improvement are not correlated to pitching in shorter stints. He also remained somewhat stretched out, frequently pitching multiple innings and recording nine or more outs in six appearances. For these reasons, it’s unsurprising that the Brewers will evaluate him as a starter in spring training. They did the same with Wilson.

When Thomas arrives in camp, expect to see many of the same adjustments he enacted a year ago. There’s room for more tweaks, though. He currently pitches from the third-base side of the rubber; sliding him toward first base could create a more extreme crossfire angle for right-handed batters, and it may help him hide the ball better against lefties, who posted a .343 wOBA against Thomas over the last two years.

His changeup shape and usage could also undergo modifications. Thomas threw more changeups to right-handers than sinkers, and they slugged just .324 against it with a 35.7% whiff rate, but it comes in just six mph slower than his sinker on average with similar movement. Unless he develops greater separation between his changeup and sinker, the Brewers may emphasize the latter more while recasting the former as an occasional change-of-pace offering. Only two teams threw changeups, splitters, and forkballs at a lower rate than Milwaukee in 2024.

With at least five starters ahead of him on the depth chart, Thomas is most likely to settle into Wilson’s niche as a flexible bulk reliever who makes occasional spot starts. Becoming the next Rea is a higher-percentile outcome. Either way, he’s a cerebral pitcher with a deep arsenal who is growing into the most deceptive way to utilize it. His results should play up in front of an elite infield defense, and he’s precisely the kind of pupil who has found success with guidance from Chris Hook and company.